Wednesday, 6 March 2013

The denial of nature

Don't worry – this is entirely natural.

When
I wrote at the weekend that sowing seeds allowed me to be “a god in my garden,
granting the opportunity for life to grow from what seems, on the surface, like
shriveled death,” it was within the context of a celebration of being in closer
proximity to the natural world than those of us in vast urban conurbations
often find ourselves.

So
don’t fret – there are no delusions of divinity here!

However,
it was also a reminder that my acting tutor at Leicester Polytechnic, the
wonderful Tony Yates, once told us, his students, that we were gods too, for
our ability to create; to breathe life into something as otherwise
insubstantial as a dream.

But
if my connection with nature, through the natural world, has such a simple
meaning, ideas of nature can be far more complex.

Take
religion.

The
Catholic church in particular is fond of talking of the ‘nature’ of human
beings. In particular, this tends to refer to the sexuality of human beings and
the type of relationships that the church has decreed are ‘proper’ – ‘natural’;
of nature.

Within
this context, homosexuality itself and same-sex relationships are considered
unnatural.

But
this belief in such a simplistic idea of human ‘nature’ is both false and
destructive, while the church’s continued promotion of such an idea is also
inherently hypocritical.

At
the weekend, having previously announced that he was taking legal advice over
accusations of ‘improper’ sexual behaviour, the UK’s senior Catholic cleric,
Cardinal Keith O’Brien, admitted that his behaviour had not been ‘as expected’.

In
effectively saying that the accusations were true – or had a grain of truth in
them – he basically outed himself.

If
O’Brien had made sexual advances or suggestions to other clergy – themselves
men – then he is either gay, bisexual, bi-curious or was simply downright
frustrated sexually.

And
whichever of those is or was the case, he was and presumably is denying his own
nature.

The
church’s very insistence on celibacy for clergy and nuns is a denial of nature
– even masturbation is considered a sin (this is the same for Buddhist monks) –
just as the church’s continued refutation of non-heterosexual sexualities as
natural is itself a denial of nature.

It
is both of nature and the norm to want sex. Indeed, male ejaculation has been
shown to confer health benefits in reducing the risk of prostate cancer.

So
if God says that this is bad – a situation that he created – then he is
demanding that people behave in an unnatural manner and, indeed, open
themselves up to health risk (also something that, to maintain the logic, he
created).

Many
outside the church of Rome – other religious groups and some outside any
religion – continue to fall for the fallacy that homosexuality and bisexuality
are not ‘natural’, often conflating this with their not being ‘normal’.

Part
of the problem is in demanding black and white realities with no grey in the
middle. Thus we have homosexuality in one corner, heterosexuality in the other
and nothing between the two.

Kinsey’s
idea of human sexuality being a scale – so as above, but with many different
gradations in between – makes much more sense; it certainly explains
bisexuality, for instance, and allows for the variations in the nature of
bisexual desire Bisexuals don’t simply have equal proportions of attraction to
either sex.

This
obviously makes sexuality difficult to measure in terms of simple numbers.
Estimates of the percentage of the population that is homosexual vary from
between 2% to 10%.

So
it’s quite clear from this that homosexuality is not ‘the norm’ – in other
words, it’s not the majority situation.

But
that doesn’t mean that it isn’t natural – ‘of nature’.

Homosexual
behaviour has been observed in many, many species other than humans. In other
words, it forms a part of nature. Thus, quite simply, it is natural.

Now
from a religious point of view, if one believes that God created the world and
everything in it, and nobody else has the power of creation (in Catholicism, to
believe the latter would be heresy), then one is left with a reality, according
to one’s own belief system, of God having created the full scale of sexuality,
both in humans and the rest of life on Earth.

If,
as Judeo-Christian tradition has it, Yahweh-Jehovah is omnipresent, omnipotent
and omniscient, then God created everything, in the full and certain knowledge
of what would occur.

There’s
no room for choice in this: if God knew what would happen, having himself
created it, then choice does not exist.

So
on that basis, one cannot choose one’s sexuality. Neither can one choose if one
is to act in a way that the church regards as sinful – it was preordained.

Yet
religious groups take the logic of their own beliefs and warp them to claim
that some groups are un-natural, and that we can all choose whether, through
acts or faith (and most often, a combination) we are to be saved from eternal
damnation.

As
it happens, there is no scientific evidence that sexuality is a choice.

But
let’s take a slight diversion here.

Colm
Tóibín’s new novella, The Testament of Mary, is an astonishing work, seeking to
allow Christ’s mother the chance to tell her view of the story.

Mary
is nothing more than a symbol in the Bible; a characterless, featureless piece
of fleshly clay onto which assorted events are imprinted.

In
the Bible, she has no choice in being ‘chosen’ by God to give birth to his son
– rape, by anyone’s standards – and only accepts her situation meekly after
being divinely impregnated.

Which,
as only a very slight aside, might be at the root of why the Vatican does not
see rape as a justification for abortion; it replicates the conception of Christ.

But
in his book, this symbol of womanhood is torn to pieces by Toìbìn, who presents
instead a complex, emotional human being; vulnerable and tenacious at the same
time, angry with her son’s disciples and not believing in his divinity, and facing an indescribable grief and horror at what happens.

Written
in deceptively simple language, it is an incredibly powerful and moving piece.

And
it is a portrait that is far truer to anything in nature than the one in the
Bible or the one-dimensional, hagiographical one that religion, and
Catholicism in particular, has presented down the centuries as a template for
real women.

The
Catholic Church's specialisation of distorting the nature of things is widespread
and deeply corrosive.

In
her ‘hospitals’, suffering became the norm, the natural; not to be alleviated,
even when entirely possible, but to be maintained as some sort of recreation of
Christ’s own suffering. Not that Mother Teresa herself held to the same
standards when she was ill.

It
was a warping of even the church’s own images of maternal love and care – as also happened in church orphanages and schools, and in the obscene collusion between Irish state and Catholic church that was the Magdalene Laundries.

For
centuries, various religions and religious groups have taken the word, the idea
of ‘nature’, and both distorted and denied it.

The
Catholic church is just one that had or continues to have ‘issues’ with the
theory of evolution – indeed, the pretence amongst fundamentalists that the
word ‘theory’ does not mean what it does in a strictly scientific sense either
shows a deep lack of understanding/education or is deliberately disingenuous.

But
then again, evolution is the antithesis of what such religious groups claim –
that there is a nature that is set in stone; that it is undeniable and
unchanging; that we can trace it back X hundred or thousand years and say that
it is the same now as it was then and for ever will be.

This
is all an ongoing battle. A battle that pits knowledge against superstition, in
just such a black v white manner. No grays. No grays ever.

Some
years ago, I interviewed – for the Morning Star, just so you know – the late Lord
Rev Dr Donald Soper.

It
was in his house in Hampstead. We shared tea together. I remember it fondly. He
was a charming host – and also a great intellect.

Much
of what he personally believed, I would not. But he had great honesty and
enormous integrity – and he didn’t see his faith as an excuse to close down
others and simply claim a divine right to be assumed correct.

Indeed,
Soper was one of the very first clergy to stand on a platform calling for LGBT
rights.

It
might have appalled my father – a clergyman of the same denomination – but when
I look back at it, at least I look at the Methodism I was brought up in and can
think that it was not all reactionary and hate-filled.

And
against nature itself.

There
are other clerical figures I’d think similarly of, incidentally – Archbishop
Trevor Huddlestone would be one; Archbishop Derek Worlock would be another (I
can be quite ecumenical) – and there are more.

But
here we are, watching as fundamentalists seek to fill the vacuum created as
people of moderate faith (if you will) fall away from organised religion.

And
so we see – increasingly in the mainstream – what was once the preserve of the
far-flung fringes.

Nature
changes. Nature is not set in stone. Nature grows.

That
is the nature of nature.

That
some religious people seek to pretend otherwise – and even, in attempting to do
so – warp and betray the logic of their own faith – does not change this. Not
one jot.

And
what we are left with is human tragedy: that someone like O’Brien, having denied
his own nature, must be in so much pain, and feeling so much self-loathing.

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About Me

London-based journalist, writer, photographer and artist, with one Other Half and three cats.
This blog is about all sorts of things, but mostly reviews. My interests include comics and opera (and even comic opera), cats, tattoos and art.
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